Simultaneous Electrochemical and Emission Monitoring of Electrogenerated Chemiluminescence through Instrument Hyphenation

One of the long-standing challenges to performing electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL) research is the need for dedicated instrumentation or highly customized cells to achieve reproducibility. This manuscript describes an approach to designing ECL systems through the hyphenation of existing laboratory instruments, which provide innate time correlation of electrochemical and emission data. This design methodology lowers the entry barrier required to obtaining reproducible ECL measurements and provides flexibility in the scope of applications. Uniquely, the simplicity of this system’s experimental interface, a spectrochemical quartz cuvette, readily enables collaboration with finite element modeling that simulates ECL occurring in the cuvette-based cell. This combination of empirical and simulation data allowed for the investigation of the intertwined kinetics behind the coreactant ECL mechanism of tris­(2,2′-bipyridine)­ruthenium­(II) (Ru­(bpy)3 2+) and tripropylamine (TPA). The complexity of the system measurable via the hyphenation methodology was further scaled though the addition of tris­[2-(4,6-difluorophenyl)­pyridinato-C2, N] iridium­(III) (Ir­(dFppy)3) and the observation of real time multiplexing.